Intravenous (IV) fluid delivery pumps are used to deliver fluid to a patient or to draw out fluid from a patient's body. With constantly improving technologies and user needs, the demand for improved and integrated features has increased.
One such feature is the detection of an exhausted fluid supply container in the pump system. The fluid supply is often a fluid IV bag and the detection of empty fluid supply is sometimes referred to as “empty bag detection” although detection is not limited to bags as containers. In many instances supply containers provided to a clinician by hospital pharmacies or other soluble drug suppliers are over-filled or under-filled with respect to the stated volume of the supply container. The variations in supplied fluid volume may introduce an issue for infusion pumps that have been programmed to deliver a predetermined volume of fluid where the predetermined volume is the stated volume of fluid in the supply container.
In general, the infusion pump is not knowledgeable of how much fluid is in a bag beyond what a nurse or technician indicates to the pump. This inconsistency can results in two potential, problematic situations: premature exhaustion of available fluid can cause the introduction of air into the fluid delivery path or potentially expensive or critical drugs are wasted or not fully infused into the patient. These situations could signal secondary safety mechanisms because the empty bag was unsuccessfully detected. This introduces a need for the infusion pump to detect when a supply container is exhausted to prevent waste and to avoid a nurse or technician needlessly priming infusion sets filled with air.